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As those images were being shown on TV, the idiots at NBC were also calling it a 'pivotal experiment' in history.

Russia transcends. Through every stage of its story, it's resisted any notion of limitation. Through every reinvention, only redoubling its effort to cast the towering presence. The empire that ascended to affirm a colossal footprint. The revolution that birthed one of modern history's pivotal experiments.

You know Fletch I've seen a couple of posts getting into high dudgeon over this.

I'm no lover of communism, as you know but I just can't get excited.over it. That phrase of course came from the glossy introduction to their coverage of the Olympics and all it does is acknowledge the 70 years of Communism, that most certainly existed as the Russia morphed from the Russian Empire, through the USSR into its current incarnation as the Russian Federation

The images on this post come from the opening ceremonies routine that illustrated Russia's history thru the years and this was part of the 1930s bit. We all know that these years were the height of Stalin's Terror and there is a dark side to them.but an Olympic opening ceremony is not the place to go into this, do you think?

Its not as though Stalin's terror is being brushed under the carpet - one of the great films of the post Soviet era is Утомлённые солнцем (Utomlyonnye solntsem) in English "Burned by the Sun" which deals with the Stalinist purges in a most brilliant way, if you can find a copy highly recommended.

The writer, director and star of this masterpiece is Nikita Mikhalkov and when the Olympic Flag was borne into the stadium by eight prominent Russians with much ceremony, one of the eight flag bearers was Nikita Mikhalkov

Its funny what people see and what they miss - before this part of the show a train chuffed slowly across the arena and the area behind it was lighted up Red with people dressed as industrial workers etc following.

This was the depiction of the Russian revolution and the train was the train that took Tsar Nicholas II and his family to their doom, everybody in the Stadium would have understood that.